Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

‘Guha,’ he said, ‘Guha.’

I tried to speak, but could produce only a thin scratching sound. Guha wiped the blood and mud away from my shoulder and picked me up effortlessly, draping my limp body over a shoulder. My head swayed with each stride, and my cheek slid back and forth across smooth brown skin; soon, the regular rhythm of our motion and the sound of the swamp, that twittering, grunting, humming, booming song, answered each other in a hypnotic antiphon that compelled a descent into the region of dreams and memory: already, the places and faces of my past had taken on that soft glow that hides, forever, the grotesqueries and sufferings of childhood and the desolate loneliness of first youth.

When I woke up Guha was rubbing my limbs with a wet tuft of soft grass, wiping away the caked dirt and sweat; later, he cradled my head in his lap and squeezed the juice of fruit into my mouth; and always, he spoke to me, chuckling and clucking softly, rolling his eyes, gesturing. Often, he left me in the little clearing where he made his camp and loped off beneath the heavy branches. He would return, hours later, bloody carcasses hanging from the belt at his waist. When I could walk, I hunted with him; I would crouch behind him; we stalked, and in the swamp where I had seen nothing, felt only hunger, I saw an abundance, life burgeoning, swimming, crawling, giving birth, clawing, biting, all the wonder and the filth. I killed, and each time Guha knelt over the still-warm body, murmuring under his breath, touching the bloody flesh with his long, thin fingers.

* * *

By the time the sun moved to the south and the days grew short, my clothes had disintegrated into fragments, and I dressed like Guha, even wearing feathers and stones. I learned some of his language, the words for leaves, insects, fruits and animals, for fear and danger, and we spoke to each other in fits and starts. Sometimes, in camp, at the end of the day, he would sing, raising his eyes towards the red glow between the trees; I understood some words, grasped some small fragments of what he offered to the sky, but even if I had understood nothing there would have been no mistaking the wonder in his voice, the awe and the good humour. In return, I sang him songs I remembered from my childhood. One night, under a full moon, I sang a ballad, an old clan favourite about knocking the English about in a battle long ago, and as I paused between verses Guha piped up in his quavery voice and let loose with a few lines of one of his little ditties, and soon we were swinging back and forth merrily, sending the birds whirling above the tree-tops in confusion; he bent over and thumped my knee, nodding his head, and then we both collapsed in laughter, roaring, infinitely pleased by our madness; our camp-fire crackled on, and perhaps even the watching moon smiled a little at our antics, because good friendship is hard to find, and life is long.

The next morning Guha walked around the camp picking up things, suddenly filled with purpose; he motioned to me to collect my meagre belongings. I followed him out of the clearing; that day we walked in a straight line, due west, with Guha slipping soundlessly through the bushes; at sunset we paused for a few minutes to eat, and then went on. Where are we going? I tried to ask, where? but he pressed on, silent.

That night we left the entangled trees and still water behind and moved across a rolling plain; walking across a raised dike, I saw the light from a distant lamp blinking in the dark, and realized we were in a place of cultivation, of irrigation and harvests. For a moment, I felt fear, and wished we were back in the damp recesses of the swamp, but I had crossed oceans to escape the strangling constrictions of home, to find a shining fiction called Adventure, so once again I licked my lips, grasped my weapons firmly, and we went on, never slowing or pausing. For twenty-four nights we journeyed, hiding during the days in groves of trees or fields dense with sugar-cane; several times people passed within a few feet of us, and sometimes packs of village dogs loped by, sniffing and restless, but Guha’s skill was ancient and boundless. At the end of this time we reached a region where the ground rose up in wooded ridges, and as the sun rose on the twenty-fourth day we left the fields behind and climbed into the shade of the jungle.

Now we seemed to wander aimlessly, meandering in great arcs among the trees and the brush. Guha grew dreamy, reaching out with searching hands to touch leaves and bark. By a stream, at a place where the ground was dark and loamy, he turned back to me and pressed on my shoulders, making me sink to the ground. He arranged my limbs so that I sat cross-legged, pushed at my back until my spine was straight. With his spear, he etched a circle in the ground around me. Then he cupped my face in his palms and leaned closer until I could see the flecks of yellow in his eyes, and with the tenderness that one sees in a mother’s face as she wipes her baby’s bottom, with that awkward craning of the neck, with that defenceless love, he whispered slowly, so that I could understand: ‘In the circle, stay, here it is.’

’What?’ I said, but he stepped back and reached down to the muddy circumference that bound me in, his fingers bending and snapping out, and just when it seemed that he was about to touch the soil, a sheet of white flame rose up from the circle, smokeless and clean. I cringed in terror, then stood up and screamed, begging Guha to stop it, to let me out, but he smiled, shouldering his spear, and then the flames rose up and hid him, hid everything, until I could see only a round section of sky above me, and even that was soon wiped clean by the hot orb of the sun. I sank to my haunches, sobbing. For a while, I prayed to God, to the saviour of my childhood that I had forgotten in my travels, and his blessed mother, I begged to be delivered from this place of evil and witchcraft; I mumbled apologies for associating with the undelivered who had sold their souls to Satan; I asked for divine retribution to be visited upon the mage Guha, who had trapped me, no doubt to use my soul in some filthy ritual, in some bargain with unclean demons. I knelt, my face pushed into the mud, hands clasped, confessing every transgression, every sin, every craving that had ever sprung from my sweating, excreting, mucus-ridden flesh, every burst of anger, every last iota of greed, every afternoon lost in sloth, every evening given to the disgusting business of mastication, salivation, and digestion; I confessed everything, the sins multiplying, breeding on each other in a bloody, monotonous manner, like some species of low animal: murder, lechery, buggery, covetousness; I wept until my body hurt with each wrenching sob, and then I fell into an exhausted doze.

When I awoke the flames were gone, leaving only a glowing, deep red circle that moved and trembled, like the molten lava I had heard described by a traveller on one of my ships, long ago; the ground on which I crouched was covered with congealed yellow masses of vomit. I reached out towards the red border, feeling no heat, but the closer I came to it, the more I felt a dread that rose from the region of my belly; I cannot explain this now, cannot make you understand, I think — I could no more have touched that circumference than I could have caressed a blade fresh from an armourer’s smithy, hissing and spitting; I certainly could not bring myself to step over Guha’s magic line, out of my airy prison, so I stayed.

In the dim light of dawn, I watched a deer emerge apprehensively from the trees and tiptoe to the water. Feeling the pangs of hunger, I looked around my little patch of ground, finding only a few blades of grass; I plucked a green sliver and put it between my lips, and instantly a great rush of saliva filled my mouth, but even before I had finished chewing I felt satiated. Over the next few days I discovered that I seemed to somehow absorb nourishment from the air and the sunlight, from the fragrance that drifted up from the flowers that grew among the rocks on the banks of the stream; so I survived, watching the animals and the birds, who circled me warily at first but soon accepted me as one of the inhabitants of that world, as a spectator as silent and as unthreatening as the rocks or the trees. None of the predators attempted to enter the circle, so after a while I grew to trust the efficacy of Guha’s magic, and watched the graceful lope of the leopard by day and the heavier, confident tread of the tiger by night.